Using the Pathfinder Kingdom Building rules with GURPS

[nondescript handle]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

I think I've asked this before, but what about City Stats and the city management rules in Pyramid #54?

City Stats is very good at what it does (describing cities/settlements carefully designed by the GM), and I think it can be expanded to a more general system. But it is quite hard and frustrating to do so ad hoc for an GM. This is really more a task for a game designer and a playtest group.

Scaling City Stats down (i.e. for city quarters) is the easiest, but it relies heavily on GM fiat (e.g. what is the combined Corruption Rating? The average of all quarters? The one of the government quarter?).

Scaling City Stats up for nations is much harder. E.g. in City Stats you just pick a number for the population and there are some vague hints about the area this city then covers (CS p. 12). In nation building you often have the area first and have to come up with an appropriate population number. I bolted on the Carring Capacity rules from Space p. 91, but those are very granular and incorporating Environmental Quality ratings would make a big difference especially at low TLs.
I would also like some kind of system for natural resources (e.g. silver mines, etherwood forests, etc) and other physical/social features (natural harbors, way point at the silk road, etc).
And the RAW system of 'taxes depend on CR, CR depends heavily on Society Type' is a bit constricting for players and too granular for domain play.

Also: player often want to build their domains, since they are basically an extension of the PCs. A build system would be of great help: 'You have 100 City Build Points/12M$/whatever to build your barony, normal mana only, max TL3!'

On the other hand GMs often need to come up with several NPC-domains, so a random city/domain creation table would be GM-stress reducing.